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Carri Bugbee

Second coming: the evolution of the companion screen » Digital TV Europe - 0 views

  • The huge growth of both the smartphone and tablet markets in recent years has brought with it a profound shift in viewing habits. According to recent Nielsen stats, 84% of US smartphone and tablet owners now say they use their devices as second screens while watching TV – looking up information about programmes they are watching, researching or buying goods and interacting with friends.
  • Recent months have seen the consolidation, and even closure, of some of the first crop of dedicated second screen services.
  • McDonnell claims that industry, and industry watchers, have been distracted by the buzz around so-called ‘second screening’ – “misinterpreting the audience behaviour and missing the point that it’s just all about making the TV show better.” He claims that part of this “distraction” has rested with the consumer-facing startups, eager to grab attention from broadcasters and monetise this space independently. “They’ve generated a lot of hype and have largely failed to capitalise on it,” says McDonnell.
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  • While Zeebox may have initially been focused on live, second-screen participation, Rose says that the service is now more focused on the social experience around the TV shows themselves. A recent major update to the app added MyTV, a personalised content feed based on the shows a user follows, with targeted recommendations, fan-community TV rooms and aggregated articles, news, and information. Zeebox is now even syndicating its production tools, synchronised show enhancements and TV chat rooms to its broadcast partners – including Fox, Discovery, NBC and Viacom.
  • likely part of the appeal for Shazam when it comes to TV is the possibility of tapping into the massive pre-existing broadcast ad market, offering multiscreen and interactive extensions for campaigns.
  • “Having one app that is able to do slightly different things for shows is probably a good place to be for anyone who’s investing in the technology side of it, but also for the viewer, because it’s something that you’re familiar with. There is different stuff to do in each show, so you come back for different shows that you like, and it’s a slightly different experience,” says McHugh.
  • “My belief is that broadcasters should take more ownership and control of that [second screen] space –
  • “It’s always been a quandary for broadcasters – do you partner with a cross-channel, cross-platform app such as Zeebox, do you make something for your own channels, or do you make an app for each show,” says Rose. “When it comes to second screen, I think the pendulum started with broadcasters creating an app for each show. We’ve seen in the US some broadcasters have made more than 200 apps and it’s now widely referred to as the app graveyard – these apps from several seasons back. They’re not maintained, they don’t work often, they’ve got old content, some post was last updated 185 days ago. It’s not good. So that then moved to broadcasters sometimes creating their own channel-based apps. But I think it’s hard to get traffic to a channel-based app. People don’t just watch one channel, they watch multiple channels, and so the pendulum kept swinging towards the more general-purpose app.”
  • “It’s always been a quandary for broadcasters – do you partner with a cross-channel, cross-platform app such as Zeebox, do you make something for your own channels, or do you make an app for each show,” says Rose. “When it comes to second screen, I think the pendulum started with broadcasters creating an app for each show. We’ve seen in the US some broadcasters have made more than 200 apps and it’s now widely referred to as the app graveyard – these apps from several seasons back. They’re not maintained, they don’t work often, they’ve got old content, some post was last updated 185 days ago. It’s not good. So that then moved to broadcasters sometimes creating their own channel-based apps. But I think it’s hard to get traffic to a channel-based app. People don’t just watch one channel, they watch multiple channels, and so the pendulum kept swinging towards the more general-purpose app.”
  • “My argument to broadcasters is don’t bother making a dedicated second-screen app. Just look at the simplest user-journey possible, and that’s through the web-browser,” McDonnell says. He claims it’s already “very well proven” that sending an audience to an interactive, mobile-enabled site will drive more traffic than forcing users to download a native app.
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    The word we're using is 'repatriate' - we feel that TV is generating a lot of online activity and it's going elsewhere. We'd like to bring it back into the TV space if we can. What we try to do is almost replicate what people were doing online while they are watching TV and pro-actively serve them a whole lot of this extra information," he says
Carri Bugbee

Tech's geek boy blind spot is killing good ideas | News | TechRadar - 0 views

  • While brogrammers are brogramming away to suit themselves, they're actually strangling their own chances of success. And looked at like that, it really should be obvious that the appalling record of the tech sector in attracting, employing and retaining women is one that the industry should be looking to remedy urgently and for the basest financial motives.
  • geek boy groupthink is a prison. It keeps women locked out, and that's one way in which it's disastrous. It also keeps tech firms sealed in, trapped by an idea of their audience as fundamentally like their nerdy selves which stops them from coming up with any number of good new ideas - good ideas that consumers like you and me would fall over themselves to use if only someone would invent them.
Carri Bugbee

GetGlue Sale: Let the Second-Screen Shakeout Begin | Variety - 0 views

  • So what’s to become of the dozens of startups that came out of the second-screen craze? “There’s definitely going to be a lot of consolidation that happens,” said Jesse Redniss,
  • According to i.TV, GetGlue will remain a separate product while letting it benefit from i.TV’s “broader platform of partners and services.” Provo, Utah-based i.TV claims 15 million people use its TV app every month. ”Together, i.TV and GetGlue will reshape the social TV and second screen landscape,” i.TV CEO Brad Pelo said in announcing the deal.
  • In a fight for survival, ConnecTV has pivoted its strategy. Last week the startup, whose investors include 10 broadcast station groups, released an overhaul of its app refocused on a simple idea: It lets users “clip” six-second video segments from among 400 live TV channels and share them on Twitter and Facebook, via a link in email or within the app.
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  • ConnecTV’s previous app had signed up only 980,000 registered users; other social TV players are similarly tiny. U.K. second-screen import Zeebox, even with the backing of NBCU, Comcast and Viacom, has tallied only around 3.5 million registered users in the U.S. (it doesn’t disclose how many are active). Viggle, which rewards users for tuning in to TV, has made very little headway: It counted just 757,273 monthly active users for June.
  • An eMarketer analysis this month of several industry surveys conducted this year showed that just 15%-17% of TV viewers engaged in real-time socializing about the TV shows they were watching.
Carri Bugbee

New S3 Research Paper Tackles Casting, Names Top Second Screen Apps : 2nd Screen Society - 0 views

  • If done right, “casting” just might be the “killer” app the second screen world has been looking for.
  • The report pinpoints which apps are resonating with consumers (and why), and focuses on the new role “casting” content is playing in the second screen ecosystem.
  • “However, we also noted several apps — including Amazon Instant Video, M-Go, and several TV Everywhere services — that currently have no identifiable casting experience,” said Chuck Parker, chairman of the 2nd Screen Society.
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  • The second screen apps earning the highest praise in the report: • NextGuide, a personalized TV listings guide designed for the iPad. • BuddyTV, a universal TV search and recommendation portal. • Beamly (formerly Zeebox), a social TV and networking platform geared toward mobile devices. • Viggle, which offers engagement incentives for consumers to earn points for real-world rewards. • The USA Anywhere TV Everywhere app. • The HBO Go TV Everywhere app. • The NCAA March Madness app created by Turner and CBS. • SmartGlass, the game-centric second screen endevour Microsoft launched for the Xbox platform. • ConnectTV, which offers consumers the ability to clip and share a short clip of the show they’re viewing.
  • report also delves into the two major use-cases of second screen apps: the second screen as a companion experience and as a multi-screen viewing experience; and examines how developers and publishers have taken advantage of 4G LTE networks to create second screen apps experiences — especially for sporting events — that allow for seamless access in and out of the home.
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